How to Harness the Power of Emojis in Email Marketing

With all the noise in today’s inbox, each email often looks the same. Marketers have struggled to find ways to break through and to get their email campaigns opened. However, a recent trend has seen special symbols AKA emojis in our email subject lines to capture audience’s attention. For those wondering, emojis are the graphic ideogram, first started in Japan that have taken over social media, texting and even marketing conversations. With the boom in opens on mobile, the use of Emojis in email helps to convey something which words cannot, i.e. emotion to the readers.

Your business can also harness the power of emoji by addressing these 3 questions:

1. Who is your target audience?

Knowing your audience means knowing their needs. Emojis are not appropriate for every business and are mostly used when it is a business to customer (B2C) communication. Research your subscribers before you shoot an emoji rich campaign. Use of emojis has been tested and shown that they do increase your email open rates, but it also depends on your industry. Moreover, including emojis in your conversation makes you look more approachable online.

2. Which emojis will make or break your email?

To make sure you’re on target, choose the right emoji for the right campaign. Be sure it makes sense and don’t overuse it in an email. Using the right emoji in your campaign makes you friendly and competent with your customers. Business related emails when paired with emoticons often sound less negative and increases the level of engagement.

3. What are the different platforms on which your emails are opened?

Emojis appear differently across popular email clients. If an email client doesn’t support a character, the recipient will see a ☐ character instead. For example, in desktop chrome the subject line with emojis will appear as blocks but when you will open the same email on mobile it will appear fine. It has been found that the emoji didn’t appear properly in Outlook 2003, 2007, 2010 and 2013’s notification popups but, generally iOS and Android both have good emoji support. That is the reason, Twitter and WordPress have started replacing emoji Unicode characters with images to ensure support everywhere. Contributing to the development of the emoji community, in the last year Twitter has also started open sourcing their emojis for everyone. Hence, if your customers are opening most of your emails on mobile, then it is worth including emojis to spice up your email text.

The bottom line is emoji can make your emails stand out in an overwhelmed and overcrowded inbox. Once you have determined your right emoji, use the A/B testing feature to judge which campaign will work best for your subscribers. The best way you communicate to your customers is always evolving and you need to analyze what works best for your business.